Designing a cMOOC for Lecturer Professional Development in the 21st Century

Designing a cMOOC for Lecturer Professional Development in the 21st Century

Thomas Cochrane, Vickel Narayan, Victorio Burcio-Martin
Copyright: © 2017 |Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1624-8.ch089
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Abstract

This chapter explores the design of a framework for up-scaling a lecturer professional development strategy based upon communities of practice from pockets of excellence to span across a university utilizing a cMOOC framework. The framework links global experts into an authentic professional development experience via the integration of a range of mobile social media learning technologies. The framework includes a series of triggering events designed to support the development of participants' personal eportfolios and pedagogical practice that can then be optionally validated by external CMALT accreditation. We believe the framework provides a transferable professional development model for other institutions to explore.
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Theoretical Foundations

There are a number of theoretical foundations that inform the design of our mobile social media cMOOC framework, which we explore in the following sections, including:

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    Social learning theories (Head & Dakers, 2005; Vygotsky, 1978).

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    Communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Wenger, White, & Smith, 2009).

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    New Pedagogies: heutagogy (Blaschke, 2012; Hase & Kenyon, 2001, 2007), connectivism (Siemens, 2005), and rhizomatic learning (Cormier, 2008b).

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    Technology as a catalyst: SAMR (Hockly, 2012; Puentedura, 2006).

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    cMOOCs (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens, & Cormier, 2010; Waard, 2012)

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    The Scholarship Of Teaching and Learning, SOTL (Boyer, 1990; Danvers, 2003; Haigh, 2010; Weaver, Robbie, Kokonis, & Miceli, 2012).

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    Accreditation of professional development (CMALT).

Social Learning Theories

Social learning theories emphasize the collaborative and relational aspects of how we learn. Vygotsky (1978) highlights the social nature of how we construct knowledge (social constructivism), and how we learn via extending the limits of our knowledge through interaction with more experienced peers. Vygotsky’s ideas have laid the foundation of many modern pedagogical frameworks (Brown, Metz, & Campione, 1996). Laurillard (2001) builds upon the foundation of social constructivism within her conversational framework, and extends this into a model for collaborative curriculum development (Laurillard, 2012). Head and Dakers apply social constructivism and collaborative learning within the context of learning in technology education:

In this model, the teacher and pupils agree the areas and themes for research within an overall context. Students act as researchers on one of these themes or sub-themes and in so doing become the community experts on that theme. They are then in a position to teach the others in the classroom and thus contribute to the creation of common knowledge and understanding. In order to carry out these tasks, the learners develop a language that becomes increasingly subject specific and academic as they learn and disseminate. (Head & Dakers, 2005, p. 43)

The development of social media and social networking has provided rich tools to support social constructivist pedagogy and led to the coining of terms such as pedagogy 2.0 (McLoughlin & Lee, 2007, 2010), produser (Bruns, 2008), and learner-generated contexts (Cook, 2007).

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